Crossing the Culture Chasm
or How to grow your company
or The Me, Us, Them Paradigm
You’ve heard of the law of 3 and 10. Every time your company grows to a 3 or a 10, everything breaks. You’re a 3-person startup humming along. You grow to 10, broken. Systems don’t work anymore. Meetings don’t work the same way. You need to rebuild. You’re a 10-person shop and grow to 30, everything breaks. You can’t operate the same way with 30 people as you did with 10. Part of this is a numbers game. More people, more personalities, more opinions, more egos, new system needed. But part of it is the profile of the people. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today.
The Me, Us, Them paradigm.
(You can read more about the Law of 3 and 10 and Hiroshi Mikatani, Founder of Rakuten, here.)
The Me, Us, Them Paradigm is best illustrated through a set of three concentric circles.
The innermost circle, or Me Circle, represents the beginning of a company. When every employee is a founder there is no separation between the identities of the founders and the identity of the company. The founders are the company. The company is the founders.
But if all goes well, it soon becomes clear that the (let’s say three) founders can’t do everything. They are each wearing a handful of hats, they are running out of bandwidth and they need help. So they hire a handful of new people.
These people are the US.
The Us Circle is made up of trusted friends, family and former colleagues. You can imagine a founder calling up a colleague from a former job. “Remember how we used to always talk about building something and making our own dent in the universe? I’m starting to do it. And I want you to join me.”
The Us is not a group of employees. Likely, there isn’t a ton of cash flow yet and part of the compensation for the Us is a stake in the company. The Us is a trusted group and has a vested interest in seeing the company succeed.
And here’s where things get interesting.
Soon enough, the work has expanded to the point where the Me’s are working on moving the business forward, the Us’s are working on making the business work and the Us’s need teams. Each of them wants to hire a small team to support the work or the department that they are running. The sales Us needs a sales team. The marketing Us needs a marketing team. The design Us needs a design team.
This leads the company to the Them Circle. And this is where the Culture Chasm opens up. Because moving from Us to Them is vastly different from moving from Me to Us. It is now time to advertise, interview and hire for defined roles. More than that, the people who come to fill these roles, while they may be motivated by the mission and vision of the company, ultimately, they are being paid to do a job. And that changes the equation on motivation.
Motivation
Everyone needs to be motivated. Everyone needs a reason to get up in the morning, to focus on a task and to do their work to the best of their ability.
For the Me’s, it’s obvious. Me’s want to make a dent in the world. Me’s want to be seen as successful leaders. Me’s want their company, the company that is tied up in their identity as professionals and as human beings, to succeed. Me’s are internally motivated. No one needs to motivate them.
For the Us’s, motivation comes in two forms: professional pride and investment. Us’s have an opportunity to show the world how amazing they were at building a world-class marketing department at a successful company. Us’s can use this experience as a feather in the cap for the rest of their career. And, if the Us’s are stakeholders, the success of the company means success for their bank accounts. The company does better, the Us’s do better.
The most complex characters in this drama are the They’s. They’s need to be externally motivated by the Us’s. And, if done right, internally motivated by the alignment of their own goals with that of the company.
Let me explain.
They’s don’t want a job. They want a Journey.
They want to know that the work they are doing for this company is making them better professionals so that they can get the next job they want whether it is inside the company or out there in the world. (Read more about this here.)
It is the job of Us’s to create the infrastructure necessary to ensure that They’s know for certain that their careers matter to the Us’s, that their hopes and dreams matter to the Us’s, that their challenges and successes are recognized by the Us’s.
That infrastructure need not be complex. We usually recommend a quarterly Journey Session where all employees set goals, laying out their desired Destination — Where do you want to go? — and Victory Conditions — What will it look and feel like when you get there? What will you see more of? What will you see less of? And then we recommend setting up weekly or bi-weekly Journey Check-Ins that become a safe space to talk about Journeys in progress. What’s working? Where are you getting stuck? What might you try next time?
The combination of these two simple practices helps to align individual goals with company goals. And that alignment is key to They’s feeling connected to the larger mission of the company and feeling like they are of value.
The Culture Chasm
The Culture Chasm is a time period and a building of the company from Me’s and Us’s to Me’s, Us’s and Them’s. It doesn’t happen in a moment. You don’t hire the entire They Circle in one day. It happens over a period of six months or a year. And that time period is critical to establishing and solidifying your culture.
The Culture Chasm happens in three stages:
Stage One: Pre-Hiring
Stage Two: Hiring
Stage Three: Operating
Stage One: Pre-Hiring
This is the time when it has become clear that the company needs a They Circle but has not yet started hiring for it. Talk about what kind of company you want to be, not to the outside world, but internally. How do you hire, onboard, promote? How often do managers meet with their people? How do managers keep their fingers on the pulse of their people?
It is in this stage that you prepare to expand. The way a person is hired sets the stage for the way they experience the company, the way they see themselves in the company, the way they talk about the company to people out there in the world. (See this article on the importance of Brand Ambassadors.)
Establish a simple set of practices for the way you care for your new hires even when they’re not so new anymore.
Stage Two: Hiring
As you begin to hire, make sure that you and your people follow through with the practices that you decided on in stage one. A promise without follow-through is worse than a lie. You want your people to believe that you will do what you say you’ll do. That the picture you painted in the hiring process is far exceeded by the real experience.
Talk with your team about how the practices are working. If they need to be tweaked, tweak them. No one expects your best-laid plans to be perfect. And the ability to adjust is an important modeling exercise for your people.
As more people are hired, give more experienced new hires an opportunity to mentor and guide them. Empower them to care for others as soon as you can.
Stage Three: Operating
Once you have built out the entirety of your They Circle, the work is not over. You need to make sure that the practices you have put into place are habitual. They are natural, internalized. In short, they are the culture: the way we do things around here.
Beyond Me, Us, Them
Becoming a 30-person company is, of course, not the end for many companies. But no matter how big the company gets, a successful crossing of the Culture Chasm is essential to success in the short and long term. Rushing across the Culture Chasm is a setup for problems down the road. And if you are going to be a wildly successful company for many years to come, isn’t it worth taking the time to cross carefully?
Here’s your challenge: Identify where you are on the Me, Us, Them continuum. Are you just a few founders who are hustling to do everything? Have you expanded to the Them Circle and have a trusted outer circle of leaders? Are you ready to cross the Culture Chasm? Are you crossing it right now? Are you already across? Figure out where you are and then spend some time figuring out where you want to go and how you are going to establish and sustain the culture you want for your company. It could be the most important decision you make.
I’d love to hear what you learn. We at CultivateMe are fascinated with the way people work now, the way people wish they could work and how we can build the bridge to the new world where learning and work are two parts of the same whole. Send me an email at doug@cultivateme.xyz.
If you’d like to learn more about CultivateMe and the way we are solving the employee engagement challenge, check us out at cultivateme.xyz.
